


Perfect Timing

by GravityAlwaysWins



Category: Queer as Folk (US)
Genre: Angst, Fluff, Late Night Conversations, M/M, Marriage Proposal, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-24
Updated: 2020-04-24
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:13:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23812870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GravityAlwaysWins/pseuds/GravityAlwaysWins
Summary: Set about a year after 5x13.  Ted finally asks Blake something he’s wanted to ask him for days, and a late night, long overdue conversation ensues.
Relationships: Ted Schmidt/Blake Wyzecki
Comments: 8
Kudos: 7





	Perfect Timing

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve had this fic saved on my computer for quite a while and I finally decided to finish it. It’s not my best piece of writing, but I wanted to share something cheerful during this difficult time. Hope you all enjoy! Thank you in advance for reading. Comments are always welcome and appreciated 😊

Ted had planned to ask him for days now, but every night while he was brushing his teeth, he would look in the bathroom mirror at his forty year old face, pull at the lines etched around his eyes and mouth, and all the breath would leave his body in a heavy sigh. And then in the morning, Ted would watch him get dressed and that little voice from years ago would creep into his head - “why would someone like him want someone like you?” And then that man would turn and catch Ted’s gaze and smile at him in that way that always made his world brighter. 

And still that question never made it passed Ted’s lips. Something always held it back – fear, insecurity, doubt. All he kept thinking was ‘what if he says “no”? Or worse yet, what if he says “yes” when he really wants to say “no”?

It wasn’t until they were sitting on the sofa one night, half asleep, their feet intertwined and resting on the coffee table, his head on Ted’s left shoulder, that Ted knew he wanted this moment now and for the rest of his life, and that he would be fool if he didn’t ask him the question, or at least let him know how he felt.

“Blake” he said, his voice cutting through the comfortable silence between them.

“Hmm?” Blake murmured, nuzzling his head into Ted’s neck.

Ted took a moment to savour the feeling of Blake’s closeness, closing his eyes for few seconds before he opened them and he spoke again. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure” Blake said, half asleep, never lifting his head from Ted’s shoulder.

Fear was about to get the better of Ted as that voice crept into his head again, but he pushed through. “Why me?” he asked, mumbling his query into Blake’s hair.

“Hmm?” Blake murmured again, still half asleep.

Ordinarily Ted would have given up at this point and let Blake drift into sleep, but he knew if he didn’t seize this moment, it would pass him by again. “Why did you pick me?”

Blake sensed the seriousness in Ted’s voice and lifted his head from the older man’s shoulder. “What?” he asked, now fully awake and puzzled by Ted’s question.

“That night all those years ago”, Ted clarified. “Why me? You could have had anyone you wanted.”

Blake’s mouth hung open and Ted was beginning to realize what a strange and loaded question this was to ask someone out of the blue, just before midnight when they were both exhausted and enjoying the comfortable silence that had grown between them. “I mean, I know you needed a place to stay and everything, and if that’s all it was, it’s okay. But there were plenty of guys there that night.” Then Ted couldn’t help but ask the question again. “So, why me?”

Blake could see the sincerity in Ted’s eyes. He wasn’t fishing for compliments. He was asking a question for which he had no answer. It took Blake a moment to collect his thoughts and once he did, he said “I did need a place to say.”

Ted’s head dropped like stone. At least Blake was being honest, he thought.

“But…” Blake was quick to continue, wrapping his hand around Ted’s let forearm. “That’s not why I chose you.”

“It’s not?” Ted asked, lifting his head just slightly. 

“It’s not”, Blake assured him. Then he took in a deep breath and let his eyelids fall closed. He smiled to himself as he pictured the precise moment he knew Ted was worth the chase. Before long he opened his eyes, still smiling, and told Ted his answer. “It was because of what you said to me.”

Ted’s brow furrowed. He couldn’t remember saying anything to Blake at all, at least not anything that could be considered desirable or attractive or even remotely coherent. “You’re going to have to refresh my memory”, he said.

“You said ‘sorry’”, Blake reminded him.

Ted brows jumped. “I did?”

Blake nodded and rested his head back down on Ted’s shoulder. “You did. When I bumped into you on the street - you turned back and you said ‘sorry’.”

“I bumped into you, remember?” Ted was quick to correct him.

“You were talking to Michael and I should’ve been looking where I was going”, Blake said. “Anyway, you turned around and you said ‘sorry’. 

“I can’t believe you remember that”, Ted told him.

“Of course I do”, Blake said earnestly. “You know what Pittsburgh’s like. I must have walked up and down those streets hundreds of times, and I ran into a lot of people – sometimes they’d run into to me. And not once did anyone turn around and apologize.” Blake lifted his head from Ted’s shoulder and looked at him carefully. “So...”, he said. “I kept my eye on you in Babylon.”

“ _That_ I remember”, Ted told him as the corner of his mouth turned upward into a smile. “The winking.”

Blake took Ted’s words as instruction and promptly winked at him just the way he had years ago under the flashing lights of Babylon. 

Ted responded by letting his whole body slide down the sofa, melting into it at the sight of that wink.

Blake laughed. “It didn’t seem to have that effect on you back then.”

“That’s because I didn’t think you were looking at me”, Ted admitted.

“Well, I was” Blake said, leaning in close. “I still am.”

A shy, appreciative smile graced Ted’s lips. “You know what I was saying to Michael when you walked past?”

Blake shook his head.

“I was telling him that there was no way a guy like you would ever be interested in a guy like me”, Ted told him. “I...I was sure you were more Brian’s type.”

A playful grin swept across Blake’s face. “Already thought you had me figured out, huh?”

Ted nodded sheepishly. “C’mon, Brian’s everybody’s type. And you were...you _are..._ young, gorgeous, blond, blue-eyed, charming, sexy. Just his type, if I recall.”

“You were charming. Sexy too – even though you didn’t realize it”, Blake told him as he ran his thumb over top of Ted’s hand.

“Right”, Ted sighed. “I’m about as charming and sexy as...” He paused and looked around their apartment, searching for something that would symbolize just how charmless and undesirable he considered himself to be. “...toast. Plain toast.”

Blake couldn’t help but chuckle. “Oh what, so you’re toast and he’s...crème Brule?”

“Precisely”, Ted said in a characteristically deadpan voice.

Blake smirked at the familiar tone. “I see” he said, as he climbed atop Ted until he was seated on his lap, facing him. “Well, I’ll take toast over crème Brule any day.”

Ted looked up at Blake and tried to hold in his smile. “You sure about that?”

“Positive”, Blake said with a flirtatious grin. “Toast has substance. It’s...versatile” he said, kissing Ted lightly on the lips. “Add something sweet and you’ve got dessert” he continued, playfully kissing Ted again. “Add a second slice and you’ve got yourself a sandwich.” Another kiss. “Add some eggs and sugar and fry it up, and it can be fancy and French, too.”

Ted let his smile break free and rolled his eyes. “PLAIN. I said _plain_ toast.”

“So be plain then” Blake insisted. “There’s nothing wrong with plain.” 

Blake went in for another kiss when Ted put his hand on the young man’s chest and stopped him. “Seriously though? You’d give up Crème Brule for...this?” he asked.

Blake leaned forward and pressed his forehead firmly against Ted’s. “Absolutely.” 

When he pulled his forehead away, he saw little more than a hint of smile on Ted’s face and his shoulders slumped. It wasn’t the reaction he had hoped for. He realized now that, try as he might, his playful approach wasn’t going lift Ted’s spirits. So he climbed off the older man’s lap and sat next to him again, resting his head against the back of the sofa.

A brief silence followed until Blake spoke again. “Ted, did I do something? Say something?”

“No, no. Don’t mind me” Ted told him, waving in front of his face with one hand while reaching for the remote on the coffee table with the other. “What else is on?”

But Blake’s hand made it to the remote before his did and he turned the television off, not wanting to let Ted brush off the question. “What is it?” he asked.

“It’s just...you know...I’m not getting any younger”, Ted admitted. “Pretty soon I’ll be an old geezer...an _older_ geezer, and you’ll still be you.”

“I’m getting older too, Ted”, Blake was quick to remind him. 

“Sure”, Ted said. “But I got a massive head start.”

“So? We all age”, Blake said. “You, me, even Brian.”

“Yeah, well, give it a few years and you’ll start wondering why you didn’t go home with him that night”, Ted quipped. 

He said it with his trade mark self-deprecating humour, but Blake knew there was genuine emotion behind his words. “Is that what this is about?” he asked. “Brian?”

Ted stayed silent and Blake knew him well enough to take that silence as a resounding ‘yes’. “Listen to me”, he said. “I’ve had guys like Brian. Back then I had a lot of them. They’re not as rare and special as you think. They’re beautiful, they are. But there’s no substance. And they only care about one thing. So, I’m glad I didn’t go home with him that night”, Blake told him. “If I had, I probably wouldn’t be here.”

“I know. You’d be living it up in some luxury pad in the middle of city with a rich, hot boyfriend” Ted said, smiling coyly.

Blake lifted his head and looked around the apartment. “No, I don’t mean _here_. I mean here _at all”_ he said, looking Ted in the eyes until it was clear the older man understood what he was trying to say.

“That’s not true” Ted said, shaking his head from side to side as he spoke.

Blake nodded. “Yeah, it is.”

“You made it through without me” Ted said, taking Blake’s right hand and pulling it into his lap.

“I made it through _because_ of you”, Blake told him.

Ted smiled appreciatively and was about to interject when Blake continued. “...only you terrified me so much, I didn’t see it at the time.”

“What?” Ted asked, nearly laughing. He thought of himself as many things – boring, bland, uptight, pathetic, plain – but never ‘terrifying’.

“Just...how much you cared”, Blake explained. “How kind you were. It was terrifying.”

“Terrifying?” Ted repeated.

“Because I couldn’t ever repay it”, Blake told him. “Because I felt like I didn’t deserve it. Because it didn’t even feel real or possible that anyone could care that much.”

Ted listened intently, feeling a sense of wonder and sadness as he did. He rarely heard Blake speak about their early years together or about what had been going through his head during that time.

“All those Brians I went home with…” Blake continued. “They’d want me, they’d be all over me, they’d compliment me, they’d fuck me and by morning, they’d realize just who it was they brought home. That I wasn’t perfect. And that whatever it was they saw in me was gone. And that was that. They’d tell me to get out and I did.”

Ted suddenly felt a pang of guilt in his stomach. He couldn’t help but think of the day long ago when he kicked Blake out of the very apartment they were sat in now. “I told you to get out too once” he said, as his eyes filled with sadness.

“Yeah, and then you apologized, just like you did on the street”, Blake was quick to point out. “Living like that, you start to believe that’s all there is - shallow people who want shallow things. People who pretend to care, but don’t. Not really. And even though I thought you might be different, I was sure I’d screw everything up. And that eventually, you’d get rid of me for good, just like they all did. You would give up. Only you never did.”

Ted shrugged his shoulders modestly. To him, it was no great achievement to have maintained unwavering belief in the strong, sweet young man sitting next to him. 

“You don’t see it, do you?” Blake asked, his voice filled with urgency. “It comes so naturally to you. You just assume everyone is that kind, and they’re not. They’re not.” 

Blake knew cruelty well. He had endured a great deal of it for someone so young – the cruelty of homelessness, of addiction, of being exiled from his family, of being completing disconnected from the world around him and all the people in it. He took in a deep breath as he remembered what it felt like to given a moment of kindness in that cruel world. “I’ll never forget when you looked at me and said ‘I’m so proud of you’, like it was nothing. Like it was just something people say, something everybody says. But nobody ever said to me before. And you don’t know what that did to me – hearing that. It was amazing, but it was the most terrifying thing in the world.” 

“Sorry – I”, Ted began.

“No, no, no”, Blake stopped him. “See? There you go again - apologizing. The point is, I was coward. I hurt you. I ran because you didn’t. Because I knew you wouldn’t. I gave up the one good thing in my life because I was terrified of just how good it was. How good you were. And I didn’t want to ruin that.” 

Ted reached up and put his hand on Blake’s cheek. “You didn’t ruin anything”, he said softly.

“Yeah, I did. I did. It’s okay to say it”, Blake pushed back. “A long time ago you asked me for my truth and I didn’t give it to you. So here it is - the truth is... _my_ truth is...there were a lot of times back then when I’d ask myself the same question you just asked me. I’d look at you and I’d think, ‘why does this guy want anything to do with me? All I do is fuck up his life.’ And even now, I still ask myself the same question – ‘Why does this guy want anything to do with me, after all the pain I caused him? Why does he _still_ care?’”

“You never fucked up my life” Ted told him, almost grimacing at the very idea that Blake believed that was true.

“I did”, Blake said. “Your life was together. Mine wasn’t.”

“My life wasn’t together”, Ted told him, letting his hand drop from the young man’s face. “It might have seemed that way to you at the time, but it wasn’t. I wasn’t happy. I was miserable, and lonely, and stuck in my routine. I didn’t like my life. I didn’t like myself. And then suddenly, you gave me a reason to get up in the morning. A reason to smile. I don’t think I ever had that before. So, you never fucked up my life. My life was already fucked up. All you did was make it better.”

Blake shook his head. “Ted, that’s nice of you to say, but…”

“I know things weren’t always easy, okay?”, Ted interrupted. “But even worrying about you back then was sort of a blessing. I mean...you know, I wish you never had to suffer, but it did mean that for once I wasn’t stuck in my own head. You may have noticed – I wallow a lot. But you being there - it rescued me from my own hell. It rescued me from this” Ted said, tapping at the side of his head with his pointer finger. 

Blake reached up and placed his hand on the spot Ted had touched, a sad smile on his face as he looked in Ted’s eyes.

Ted scooted forward on the sofa, took Blake’s free hand in his own and said, “You make me _so_ happy. Do you know that?”

Blake stayed silent and lowered his gaze.

“And just for the record, you make me proud everyday”, Ted told him. “So, please stop. Stop punishing yourself for whatever it is you think you did or didn’t do, okay? Because I don’t regret a single second I spent with you.”

Ted sighed when Blake gaze remained low even as he tried to lift the weight of guilt from his shoulders. “Will you look at me? Just look at me” he said softly, tilting Blake’s face upward with a touch of his finger under the young man’s chin. “Kindness should never be terrifying. You _deserve_ kindness. You deserve to be loved. And you don’t owe me anything. I don’t want anything from you. I just want you. That’s the greatest gift you could ever give me. Just being here.” Ted stopped and looked around the apartment as Blake had earlier. “And being _here_ ” he said, taking Blake’s hand and squeezing it gently before bringing it to his chest.

Ted sighed again as he looked at Blake’s tearful gaze. This was the moment he had been waiting for. “Wait here” he told Blake, giving his hand another gentle squeeze before heading to their bedroom.

As Ted disappeared from view, Blake couldn’t help but smile to himself at the older man’s multiple uses of the word “here.”

Within moments, Ted returned, a man on a mission. “So, Blake Wyzecki...” he began. “I was hoping you wouldn’t mind if I asked you one more question? I know it’s awful timing, but I figure awful timing is sort of our thing, so we might as well embrace it.”

He removed a small, black, felt-covered box from the left front pocket of his jeans, knelt down in front of Blake, opened the box and said, “Will you marry me? Because you are the most wonderful human being I have ever known and it would be a privilege and an absolute joy to spend the rest of my life with you.”

Blake’s mouth hung open in stunned silence and Ted felt his nerves begin to get the better of him. “I mean...” he began, breaking eye contact with Blake and letting his head and shoulders fall. “You know, you don’t have to say yes or anythi-

But before Ted could finish his sentence, Blake took his face in his hands and lifted the older man’s gaze to meet his own. Blake stared at him for a moment with a tear-filled smile, then kissed him with a passion that left them both breathless.

As their lips parted, Ted was in a daze. “Is that a ‘yes’?” he asked, blinking slowly as if waking from some beautiful dream.

Blake covered his mouth and nose with his hands and nodded. “Yes” he declared, letting his hands drop down to reveal the wide, shimmering smile hidden beneath them. “Yes! Yes! Yes!” he repeated with that youthful exuberance Ted loved so much.

Their mouths met with such force that Ted was knocked from his knee and both men toppled to the floor, their lips never parting. 


End file.
